At fi rst, the impact of European voyages along the west coast of Africa was not much
stronger than in Asia. Tropical diseases such as malaria, yellow fever, and sleeping sickness
killed Europeans quickly, so that Portuguese traders often stayed only a short
while, as close to the coast as possible. They set up permanent fortifi ed trading posts,
but relied on existing trading networks to buy and sell goods. The kings of Portugal
made treaties with the rulers of West African states such as Benin, Oyo, and Kongo,
supplying them with wool and silk cloth, tools, and weapons, in return for gold, cotton
cloth, ivory, and slaves.
A few missionaries ventured further inland, fi rst searching for the Christian kingdom
of Prester John, and when they never found it, working to convert the people
they did meet. They had the greatest success in the kingdom of the Kongo, a powerful
state including parts of what is now the Republic of Congo, Zaire, and Angola. Jesuit
and Capuchin missionaries gradually learned Kikongo, so that they could hear confessions
and preach in the local vernacular; the fi rst book printed in a Bantu language
was a bilingual catechism in Portuguese and Kikongo, written in 1556 and printed
in 1624.
Kongo was ruled by the manikongo , or king, who had both religious and political
power and appointed governors for its six provinces. Converts to Christianity included
the manikongo Nzinga Nkuwu ( ruled to 1506), who took the Christian name João I,
the same name as the king of Portugal. The next manikongo , Nzinga Mbemba, whose
Christian name was Afonso I ( ruled 1506–43), was raised as a Christian, and worked
to convert his subjects to Christianity. Many of the ideas of Christianity – a heavenly
realm, priests with special powers, an initiation ritual involving water and signifying
rebirth, angels and demons – were similar to religious ideas already present in West
Africa, which meant it was not diffi cult for people to accept Christian teachings. The
rulers and Kongolese church leaders revised Christian ideas and practices according
to their own values, just as Europeans had done when Christianity fi rst spread north
from the Mediterranean. Christianity became an important part of Kongolese culture,
with so many churches in Mbanza, the capital of Kongo, that people called it “Kongo
of the Bell.”
At the same time as Christianity was spreading in the Kongo, another import was
beginning to have disastrous effects – sugar. Sugar cane is native to the South Pacifi c,
and was taken to India in ancient times, where farmers learned to turn cane juice into
granules that could be stored and shipped easily. It then went to China and the Mediterranean,
where islands such as Crete, Sicily, and Cyprus had the right kind of warm, wet
climate for growing sugar. The Atlantic islands off the coast of Africa also had this kind
of climate, and shortly after they were discovered by Europeans, sugar growing and
processing began here. Producing sugar takes both expensive refi ning machinery and
many workers to chop and transport heavy cane, burn fi elds, and tend vats of cooking
cane juice. This means that it is diffi cult for small growers to produce sugar economically,
and what developed instead were large plantations, owned by distant merchants
or investors. The earliest sugar plantations in Europe and Africa were worked by both
free and slave workers from many ethnic groups, but by the 1480s the workers in many
sugar plantations, especially those on the Atlantic islands off the coast of Africa, were
all black African slaves.
Columbus saw the possibilities of sugar fi rst-hand when he lived on the island of
Madeira, and he took sugar cane cuttings to the Caribbean on his second voyage. The
fi rst sugar mill in the western hemisphere was built in 1515 in what is now the Dominican
Republic. Brazil also had the right kind of climate, and by the middle of the sixteenth
century investors from all over Europe were setting up sugar plantations there. By 1600
Brazil was Europe’s largest source of sugar, and sugar had become a normal part of
many people’s diets. Per capita consumption in England was several pounds per person
per year, still tiny compared with modern sugar consumption (the United States has the
world’s largest per capita sugar consumption, at about 150 pounds a year), but much
more than it had been in the Middle Ages, when sugar was such a luxury that people
thought of it more as a drug than as a food. Sugar may not be physically addictive, but
the human demand for sugar seems insatiable, as long as the price is low enough.
Slavery and shipping kept the price of sugar low. Sugar growers in the Caribbean
and Brazil fi rst tried to force native peoples to do the back-breaking labor that sugar
demands. In the Caribbean, Spanish settlers ( encomenderos ) were given rights to compel
native labor in the encomienda system, but the native peoples either died or ran
away. Few Europeans were willing to wield machetes and haul cane in the hot sun for
any amount of wages. The solution was the same one that had worked on the Atlantic
islands – import enslaved Africans and set up huge plantations, where large numbers
of workers supplied the sugar cane to keep complicated refi ning equipment running
all the time. Slave- traders from West African coastal areas went further and further
inland to capture, buy, or trade for more and more slaves. Some rulers tried to limit the
slave trade in their areas, but others profi ted from it, and raiders paid little attention
to regulations anyway. They encouraged warfare to provide captives, or just grabbed
people from their houses and fi elds. The slave trade grew steadily, and fi rst thousands
and then tens of thousands of people a year, the majority of them men and boys, were
taken from Africa to work on sugar plantations. For 350 years after Columbus’s voyage,
more Africans than Europeans crossed the Atlantic.
Slaves were marched from the interior of Africa to the coast, where they waited in
locked pens to be loaded on to ships. On board, they were crowded into the fi lthy,
stinking space below the decks, sometimes with not enough room to sit up. Food and
water were limited for everyone on the ship, and even more so for slaves, who also
suffered beatings and brutal treatment at the hands of the crew. On early slave trips as
many as half the slaves died on the trip across the Atlantic – later called the “middle
passage” – though in time mortality declined as ship-owners realized they could make
better profi ts if they kept the slaves alive. At every stage, slaves resisted their capture by
refusing to work, sabotaging equipment, running away, or rebelling. In most islands of
the Caribbean and on the South American mainland, communities of escaped slaves,
known as “maroons,” came together in forested or swampy areas, free from the control
of plantation owners or government offi cials.
Slavery was a part of many societies around the world in 1500, but the plantation slavery
of the New World was different from most other slavery in two ways. One of these
was the fact that almost all the slaves were black, and almost all the owners and managers
were white, so that plantation slavery had a racial element that slavery in other parts
of the world did not. Both European Christians and Arabic Muslims saw black Africans
as inferior, barbaric, and primitive, attitudes that allowed them to buy and sell African
slaves without any concern. By linking whiteness with freedom and blackness with
slavery, the plantation system strengthened these racist ideas; slaves became the ultimate
Other, only barely human. In fact, plantation owners came to think of their slaves
more as machines than human beings; like machines, slaves would wear out and need
replacing. Brazilian owners fi gured that most slaves would live about seven years, and
they calculated the costs of buying new slaves into the price they hoped to get for their
sugar. Some Christian missionaries objected to this treatment, especially for slaves who
had converted to Christianity, but offi cially the Catholic and later Protestant churches
accepted slavery. Sometimes church leaders even praised slavery, saying that though it
might make people’s lives on this earth worse, it gave them the opportunity of getting
into heaven by becoming Christian, so in the long run they were better off.
The second new thing about plantation slavery was how much it depended on the
international trading networks created as a result of European voyages. Plantations
were centered on the monocultural production of one commodity, fi rst mostly sugar,
and later other crops such as coffee, indigo, and cotton, which meant that everything
else needed on the plantation had to be imported. Ships that brought slaves to the
Caribbean and Brazil – and later, in smaller numbers, to North America and the rest
of South America – took raw sugar and molasses to Europe. Raw sugar was refi ned
into white sugar in the Netherlands, and used to make sweet wine in Portugal and its
Atlantic islands. One kind of sweet wine is still called Madeira, the name of the island
where Columbus and his family had lived, and the site of the earliest European sugar
plantations. Sugar and wine were shipped to England and other parts of Europe in
exchange for cloth, manufactured goods, and machines. Ships took fl our and lumber
from North America to tropical plantations, and on the way back carried molasses,
which was processed into rum. Rum and wine were on every European ship crossing
any ocean, for they could be sold at a profi t almost anywhere and were part of the
crews’ daily rations. West Africa, Europe, and the Caribbean formed three points in
what is often called the “triangle trade” of the Atlantic, which will be discussed in
greater detail in chapters 12 and 13; any leg of this triangle offered opportunities for
wealth.
Slavery is often perceived as a very backward system, in contrast to modern industrial
factories, but in many ways plantations were factories, mass-producing one
specifi c thing to be sold as widely as possible. The slave trade by itself did not bring
spectacular profi ts, but the plantation system was an essential part of a business
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9-08-2015, 16:51
Europeans in Africa: slavers and sugar growers
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